One night. One cinema. Six movies. Are you ready for Freddy?
That was the more than tempting carrot dangled in front of hungry horror fans by Sheffield horror festival Celluloid Screams, here breaking out of its extended weekend format to bring one of several events it will be holding this year outside of the main event. Cell’s previous overnighters have featured five unrelated films, but with an extra title on the slate to work through Krueger’s history, how would it affect those brave/stupid enough (delete as applicable) to take on the challenge? Considering the premise of the series, it was apt to use the tagline “Don’t fall asleep” but did I, or anyone else, drift off before the evening, and most of the following morning, was through?
SATURDAY 28th MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA CAFÉ/BAR, SHEFFIELD. 9:00 PM
When you’re about to embark on a such an undertaking at the flicks, preparation is key. Plenty of sleep the night before. A relaxing day leading up to that six film endurance test. Of course, because I am an idiot, I stuck to neither of those, having double billed They Will Kill You and Ready Or Not: Here I Come the evening before, getting home late and getting to sleep even later. I was awake a few hours later in order to get the train into Birmingham, where I watched the matinee performance of jukebox musical Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, before catching a train back to Sheffield and grabbing food in the city centre before heading to the Showroom.
Getting there an hour before the start allowed for some downtime. Another all-nighter had been scheduled, covering the extended version of the Lord Of The Rings movies, and those folks were getting ready to go into The Fellowship Of The Ring as I rocked up. It felt like that’s where the grown-ups were heading, leaving the rest of us to indulge in that dirty horror stuff. Celluloid Screams supremo Rob Nevitt and programmer/social media head honcho Lucy Swift were also there so we were able to have a chat about upcoming spin-off festival Culture Shock and this also allowed me to profess my undying love for Possession, which is on this year’s line-up.
The usual suspects arrived as the start time drew near and there was the usual chat about which Elm Street movies we liked, which ones we didn’t, which ones we couldn’t actually remember and just who would be the first to start snoring in the auditorium. We did not have to wait long.
SATURDAY 28th MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 10:00 PM
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)
A selection of retro ads – unfortunately, it’s no longer possible to get the big taste of Westler’s hot dogs – and a slew of era-appropriate trailers set the scene for Wes Craven’s franchise starter, now sporting a comparatively genteel 15 rating and with a strange, almost comforting glow of nostalgia attached, as opposed to its 1980s reputation of unrelenting terror in a VHS box.
It still works. It’s well written, decently acted – even if there’s a whiff of Grease casting about the supposed mid-teens of the piece – and Robert Englund, whom many of us knew as the benign, bumbling alien Willie from the superior miniseries (and not so superior TV series) V, flipped the script and propelled himself to genre icon by giving us a murderer with a genuine sense of menace and complete lack of remorse, yet to be saddled with the wisecracking persona of later outings.
It doesn’t hang about either, detailing its protagonists economically and sufficiently before we launch into the dreamscape action. Folks will draw attention to a young Johnny Depp (here given an “introducing” credit, which gives an idea of the star power the industry saw in him) but it’s the killing of Amanda Wyss’ character Tina Gray which still shocks to this day. The likeable friend of Heather Langenkamp’s Nancy is brutally slashed and dragged along the walls and ceiling of her bedroom before her bloody body is unceremoniously dumped on the carpet. Dead silence in the cinema…
…except for someone snoring. Someone is snoring, in the first half of the first movie. Krueger would have had their guts for garters.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 12:15 AM
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 2: FREDDY’S REVENGE (1985)
Between the first and second Freddy fear fests there’s the longest interval the audience will be able to take in the whole of the marathon, with the gaps between films becoming less and less as the marathon kicks into gear to sort out the insomniacs from knife glove fodder. I chat with various folks who’ve obviously seen all six movies before and there’s a worry spreading across the group that The Dream Child could be the destroyer, because none of us can remember much about it.
For anyone wishing to stay in their seat for the entire event, there’s a wealth of franchise-related content on screen between each cinematic entry, including interviews, video game levels, music videos and ads. I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and peruse the memorabilia near the box office. In my case, this meant looking at the VHS case for unofficial spin off Nightmare On Sex Street and arsing about with a facsimile of the prop telephone that has the tongue emerging from it. Don’t @ me.
Freddy’s Revenge is a sequel that everyone expected in terms of making more cash for New Line Cinema, but few people expected in terms of its tone, opting for a story of supernatural possession as the family of teenager Jesse Walsh, played by Mark Patton, moves into the old Thompson house and finds that dodgy electrics are the least of their problems. Jesse is plagued by visions of the crispy killer of kids, telling the poor lad to kill various folks on his behalf.
This is the one which, apparently, has a gay subtext. Subtext be damned, this is all text, from the sequence of Jesse throwing dance moves in his bedroom to a visit to a very specific kind of bar to high school coach (and bully, natch) Schneider, being tied up in the showers by spectral forces and having his buttocks whipped with a towel. The romantic subplot between Jess and Kim Myers’ Lisa does little to convince otherwise and the shock ending of the first gets another run out here, only in a school bus, rather than a car.
And yet, there’s plenty about this film that’s fascinating. There’s clearly a drive to do something different, even if a lot of it doesn’t quite come off. The effects are pretty decent, even if a late in the day meltdown is frustratingly underused. Patton is a thoroughly likeable lead and, had there been any justice, this should have been a star making turn. Director Jack Sholder had already made a great little chiller called Alone In The Dark in 1982 and was only a couple of years away from making the classic sci-fi/horror/action mash-up The Hidden, so this is an interesting bridge between the two.
There are creepy moments along the way and Freddy’s gatecrashing of a BBQ party shows Sholder is adept at handling chaos but, like Jesse himself, Freddy’s Revenge seems a trifle confused about what it wants to be. That said, I heard no snoring during this one at all, which makes me think this one is due an intriguing revisit for those of you who haven’t seen it for a while.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 3:15 AM (BST)
A NIGHMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS (1987)
I feel that arsing about with the prop phone a second time is unnecessary and someone else is looking at the VHS box of Nightmare On Sex Street with a sense of bewilderment, so I grab a quick coffee and notice that someone is purchasing a ticket for the remainder of the marathon. There’s no temptation to tell them they’ve missed the best one because a) I’m not that kind of bellend you find in the horror community (I’m a totally different kind of horror community bellend) and b) they haven’t missed the best one as far as I’m concerned. That one is about to be screened. We are still concerned about The Dream Child.
The clocks have gone forward and the Elm Street universe has looked backwards to re-enlist Heather Langenkamp as original final girl Nancy Thompson, now a hotshot grad student and an expert in the area of dreams (well, duh). Wes Craven is back as co-producer and also on co-writing duties, alongside a certain Frank Darabont amongst others. It’s also the assured directorial debut of Chuck Russell, kicking off an impressive three-movie run, following this up with The Blob and The Mask. If you rate Arnie action-fest Eraser, make that a four-movie run. As I said, an impressive three-movie run.
Nancy’s new gig at the Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital has her cross paths with Patricia Arquette’s Kristen Parker, who has the ability to pull others into her dreams. This is useful when facing off with Freddy, as Kristen drafts in Nancy herself for an early dreamscape escape and then extends the team to include the surviving kids of those who murdered Krueger, all of whom are patients of Craig Wasson’s Dr. Gordon at the facility and ready for a bit of group therapy/arse kicking.
Amending the rules of the game without breaking them, Dream Warriors is tons of fun from start to finish, introducing an engaging bunch of new faces before having Englund turn their hopes and fears against them. Arquette is, as you’d expect, excellent, but the supporting cast are just as adept, particularly Jennifer Rubin as the “beautiful and bad” Taryn and Laurence Fishburne (in his “Larry” days) as sympathetic institution employee Max.
Adding some seniority to the proceedings are Wasson and a returning John Saxon as Nancy’s father Don, no longer a detective and seeking solace in the bottom of a bottle, but coming good in the third act as Gordon and Don are involved in a real world race against time to find Freddy’s bones and give them a proper burial before the Dream Warriors are wiped out. Don’s demise is not all that much of a shock, but there’s some surprise in the major casualty being Nancy herself, taking a glove to the guts before Krueger is banished once more, with the survivors set up to take the fight to Freddy in another inevitable continuation.
That person who purchased a ticket for the final four films was asleep within minutes of Dream Warriors rolling. I guess it beats checking into a hotel.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 5:20 AM (BST)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
There’s something about Dream Warriors which always peps me up. And at five in the morning with still three films to go, that’s a good thing. I chat with a few folks who’ve also taken a walk up to the kiosk for supplies. I think it’s time for a strategic coffee and a wander before heading back into Screen 4. Few of us can remember a lot about The Dream Master but the general consensus is that it was better than The Dream Child, which is poking its head over the horizon, ready to send us to the Land Of Nod.
What I could remember about the fourth instalment is that it was directed by Renny Harlin and that Patricia Arquette didn’t return, her character of Kristen being played by Tuesday Knight. Joey and Kincaid, the other folks who made it out of part three, were still played by Rodney Eastman and Ken Sagoes respectively.
Kincaid makes a lot of the early running in this one and is of course killed off, because reasons. Joey also goes out with a bit of a whimper, leaving Kristen and her new friend group to take on Freddy, who has been resurrected via Kincaid’s dog taking a fiery leak on the Krueger grave. Fans of the first movie may feel that the flamethrower jet of piss is exactly what Brian Helgeland and Scott Pierce’s screenplay has done to the chilling origin story, but on we go.
To be fair, The Dream Master is more enjoyable than I remembered or expected it to be. Renny Harlin had directed the atmospheric, if slightly plodding, Prison the year before and his persistence with/outright hassling of New Line Cinema head Robert Shaye finally landed the Finn the Freddy gig, and he continued his directorial ascent through popular, big budget actioners Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger before coming unstuck with unpopular, big budget actioner Cutthroat Island.
In keeping with returning Elm Street alumni not lasting particularly long, Kristen is killed off by Krueger, but not before she passes her powers to Alice (Lisa Wilcox), a timid sort who you just know is going to turn into a badass as the tale progresses. The way this is achieved is at least handled in an interesting way, with Alice inheriting the skills and personality traits of the friends of hers who are killed by Freddy so, for instance, when the guy with the martial arts skills gets bumped off, Alice breaks out the karate moves and so on.
The list of would-be victims this time don’t have the character development or personality of those in Dream Warriors, save for Toy Newkirk as Sheila, the resident science and maths expert who doesn’t fall into all of the usual geek clichés, but is unceremoniously (and annoyingly) suffocated midway through the proceedings, leaving some of the blander folks to eat up the remainder of the screen time. That said, Wilcox is very good in the lead and is up to the task of portraying the increasingly multi-layered Alice. The climax, despite some excellent prosthetic effects work, is a bit of a damp squib which ultimately relies on remembering the text of a poem called The Dream Master. Soon as that memory comes back, Freddy’s toast. Again. Still, you do get a giant cockroach along the way.
Some definite pockets of snoring in this one across various parts of Screen 4. As for me, so far, so good, but I’m not exactly looking forward to the next one. This could be the one that breaks me.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 7:15AM (BST)
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
One of the most disturbing things about all-nighters is wandering back into a foyer and realising that it’s light outside. At this point, you feel as if the event should be over. It’s now daytime, after all. I am immediately transported back to Celluloid Screams’ very first all-nighter, which ran hideously over schedule and meant that the final movie – Lamberto Bava’s superb Demons – didn’t roll its end credits at just after nine in the morning. I had watched all of the previous day’s Cell line-up as well and by the time I staggered out onto Paternoster Row, I was concerned the sunlight would cause me to burst into flames. Long story short, I went for breakfast, then had a whole thirty minutes of sleep before taking a shower for what felt like several hours and then making it for the screening of Der Fan at 1:00pm. Great days.
However, I’m older and, it appears, no wiser, because there are still two Nightmares to go, with the worrying spectre of The Dream Child now hanging directly over the noticeably wearier audience. I’m taking no chances here – a splash or two of cold water to the face, then a black coffee to accompany me back into the auditorium.
Alice and Dan (Danny Hassel), having survived the previous movie, get to at least start the movie in happy relationship mode, but this is turned on its head in fairly short order as Alice has a vision in which she imagines herself to be Amanda Krueger on the night she was attacked by the patients in an asylum. Of course, Freddy is back for a fifth go at a new pack of unwitting targets, this time using the pregnant Alice’s unborn baby as a conduit to attack her new but dwindling set of friends and this time, she doesn’t even need to be asleep.
Apparently Stephen Hopkins, the director of The Dream Child, doesn’t think much of the finished product, citing a schedule which was rushed and extensive cuts made by the MPAA to the gore. I get where he’s coming from but, having been worried about falling asleep during this one, it’s actually not that bad. The tone is darker than that of The Dream Master, the production design is effective, what you do see of the effects is very good indeed and the performances are decent across the board, with Wilcox once again being the standout.
Delving into the mythology gives this Elm Street entry a different feel to any of the other movies in the series and it doesn’t just slide into being a series of set pieces in which Freddy gets to murder someone, although there’s plenty of room for some imaginative slayings in this one. However, the atmospheric trips into the world of Amanda Krueger and the more kinetic, splattery jaunts into that of her troubled son Fred don’t always sit well together, meaning that the pacing sometimes feels off and the tone doesn’t hold across the piece. The numerous rewrites and a ridiculously short shoot probably didn’t help either.
During some early exposition, I did sense that I was about to drift off and drained the half cup of coffee I had left to stave off the snoozing but, on the whole, I didn’t mind The Dream Child. There are some intriguing ideas which are unfortunately underdeveloped, but it avoids being a lazy re-tread of what had gone before, which deserves at least some credit. The less flashy, more plot heavy bits took out a few folks but hey, the marathon had been going for around nine hours at that point, so it was understandable.
Oh, and Hopkins was given Predator 2 to direct off the back of this, so someone out there recognised his directorial chops, even if the critical and box office reception to The Dream Child was relatively underwhelming.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA SCREEN 4, SHEFFIELD: 9:05AM (BST)
FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
Having stayed awake through The Dream Child, I was reasonably confident of making it to the end without having a kip as I hadn’t seen Freddy’s Dead for a while, but remembered enjoying it. I was pretty sure we weren’t going to get the 3D Freddyvision experience for this particular screening but, even so, it was all downhill from here, or so I hoped. The folks who had wandered up to the foyer seemed to be getting their second wind and I hadn’t seen anyone give up and leave the cinema so this was a hardy flock of souls, to be sure.
The gap between the end of The Dream Child and the beginning of Freddy’s Dead was just ten minutes, so there was just about time to catch breath before Rachel Talalay’s series closer, which picks up “ten years from now” in an Ohio town called Springwood where Freddy has murdered everyone under eighteen, except for one (un)lucky teenager who sustains a head injury and ends up at a shelter for troubled youths where Lisa Zane’s Dr. Maggie Burroughs works.
Maggie tries to unlock the memories of the amnesiac teen by taking a road trip to Springwood, but things quickly go awry and the doc is pulled into the world of Freddy, unaware that she has a connection to the Elm Street killer and the scene is set for one last showdown. In Freddy’s mind. In 3D!
Well, actually, not in 3D. As I mentioned previously, I thought Freddy’s Dead would be shown “flat” and this proved to be the case. I have seen it in the version where you get to put on the crappy red/green cardboard specs and I have seen it without the bins and, although the initial 3D viewing was a novelty, I’d rather not get a headache and I’m fine with enduring various items and effects being pushed towards the lens in a slightly artificial way. It’s nowhere near as overt as the plethora of stuff being shoved into your fizzog when you watch the 2D version of Friday The 13th Part 3.
As for the film itself, I have a fairly large amount of affection for Freddy’s Dead. It spins the plot off into various offbeat directions and a lot of the humour lands without detracting from some nifty kills. The callbacks to the previous movies are all woven into a story which actually works and there’s a tendency to embrace its more creatively daft moments, while still managing to unnerve in several places, chiefly the flashbacks where the urban, unburned Englund proves to be the father and husband from Hell.
The tagline “They saved the best for last” isn’t true – could it ever have been? – and it was never going to satisfy a legion of fans who were waiting to see Freddy die in the most prolonged and spectacular fashion, but the final act is an enjoyable one, Zane makes for an appealing protagonist and you have the great Yaphet Kotto dispensing advice from the sidelines. Add to this a cracker of a cameo from early Krueger victim Johnny Depp and some of the ickiest ear violation since Chekov got his lug invaded in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and you’d have to be a curmudgeon to find absolutely nothing to like during its trim runtime, even when the approach is as wacky and, at points, downright irreverent as this.
Okay, so maybe having Freddy quoting a line from The Wizard Of Oz while he’s flying on a broomstick alongside an airliner is going to irk the purists but, six movies in, maybe it was time to be irksome and I very much like the cut of Talalay’s gib here. If you are one of those folks pining for the high points of those earlier movies, the end credits provide a potted history of the Elm Street saga and you can point to the screen and say how much better it was before they decided to make a second one.
Also, to the naysayers, I don’t recall hearing anyone snoring during Freddy’s Dead, so that whole “worst of the lot” tag slapped on it from some quarters was not replicated in Sheffield.
SUNDAY 29TH MARCH, SHOWROOM CINEMA CAFÉ/BAR: 10:45AM (BST)
After sticking around to be a part of the Survivor’s Photo, which demonstrated that the NOES marathon attendees were at least coherent, if not exactly bright-eyed and bushy tailed, I had time to burn (rather than a school janitor) before heading to the railway station and a mug of strong tea seemed the perfect accompaniment to reflect upon the festivities.
Should you do this kind of thing? Absolutely.
Will you regret it? Almost instantly. Your arse will almost certainly be numb. Your legs will feel like they belong to someone else and you will suddenly not be able to think straight, even though you think you’re thinking straight. However, once those feelings have subsided and once you’ve managed to catch up on your sleep, you’ll realise that both the cinema and the horror community is built for nights like this.
You’re part of a weird family that comes together for this kind of occasion. Few other people will understand why, but it’s not about them. It’s about a horrifically scarred murderer offing innocent folks over the course of half a dozen films and appreciating the meta undertone of not falling asleep during a franchise where its characters die when they doze off. And if you survive the night, you’ve beaten Freddy in your own unique way.
Thanks must go to Celluloid Screams Director Of Programming Rob Nevitt for organising the event and putting together all of the between film entertainment. Rob’s efforts to keep the Celluloid Screams regulars and willing newbies amused over the years must be recognised. There was talk of other potential all-nighters and one offs, the most bizarre suggesting being Guest Fest, in which 2014 Dan Stevens starrer The Guest plays repeatedly over a twenty-four hour period. Do you know what? I’d probably get a ticket for that one.
See you at the next all-nighter!